Conclusion: Borderlands – (Re)Ordered Lands

Abstract

Education is central to the dynamism of nations, and now of the global community. The process of inquiry, leading to knowledge dissemination, is not solely a Western activity. Many world scholars can be credited with historical and contemporary input for the construction of the philosophy and practice of education, for example, Aristotle, Socrates and St Paul (in the West), the scholars of the Indian Rigvedic era, the Chinese, Egyptians and Arab scholars etc., who shaped knowledge and teaching in various humanities and science disciplines. This testifies to globally spread efforts to enlighten human societies and advance the notion of a knowledgeable wanderer, a mobile academic who mould communities through the educational enterprise. It is memorable how mathematics as we know it now has its foundations in Egypt but travelled the world and is now global knowledge. Similarly, the field of accounting, although dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, has been shaped by the Italian Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli, who was the first to publish a work on double-entry bookkeeping. That can also be said for various philosophical thoughts, languages, scriptures, etc., that travelled from nation to nation to become common frames of reference and practices. Examples can be seen in the spread of the Chinese characters and language across Asia and the islands surrounding Africa, or the development of the Western alphabet which has developed as the basis of a large number of world languages.